


Phases of the Moon

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [205]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1930s, Feelings Realization, First Kiss, M/M, Mildly Dirty Talk, Pining, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Schmoop, Virgin Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 11:49:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17001114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: It’s not so much that Steve Rogers is a virgin, it’s that he’s avirgin.





	Phases of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Sexual experience or expertise (high number of partners; wide variety of sexual experience; demonstrating experience by taking the lead in sex or teaching one's partner). Prompt from this [generator](http://bleep0bleep.tumblr.com/promptsnsfw).

It’s not so much that Steve Rogers is a virgin, it’s that he’s a  _virgin_.

The kid plants his hands on his hips and throws Bucky a look that could stop traffic. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means,” Bucky says, giving Steve right back the stern, “where the hell is this coming from?”

Steve huffs. “Well, not to be crass, but I’m pretty sure that wanting to have sex with somebody comes more or less from my dick.”

“Don’t be a smart ass, Rogers. That ain’t gonna help your case.”

“My  _case_?” The kid throws up his arms, pale and skinny under the last of the daylight. “What is this, a debate club? All I said was that I wanted to go to bed with you, Buck--”

“I know,” Bucky says with a wince, “I heard you the first time.”

“--and now you’re asking me to make an argument?” Steve’s face is red now, the kind of red that he usually reserves for assholes on the street or the neighbor downstairs with the tuba. “Is that how this usually works? Somebody makes a pass at you and you ask for an Aristotelian proof?”

“Was that what that was supposed to be? A pass?” Bucky laughs in spite of himself. “Steve, staring a guy down across the dinner table and saying ‘I want you to fuck me’ isn’t in any way, shape, or form a pass. That’s a goddamn anvil to the head. Nothing subtle about it.”

“Oh, for--!” Now Steve’s laughing, a sound with a sharp edge. “Buck, you wouldn’t recognize subtlety if it slapped you in the face!”

“Is that what you think?” God, sometimes he wonders he and Stevie are from the same planet. “All the girls I bring back here, you really think I pulled them by going right up and asking if I could take ‘em home for a fuck?”

“I don’t know! Maybe!”

“Well, no. The answer is no. You can’t go for a girl like you’re going for the broadside of a barn!”

Steve scowls, an expression that hasn’t changed since he was five and punched some punk in the sandbox for giving Bucky a hard time. He was a fierce little whippet then; a taller little whippet now, but no less of a fighter--though it’s been a long time since he shot that face at Buck. “Oh, excuse me, Don Juan! Have I strayed into your area of expertise?”

“Damn straight.”

“Then oh, pray tell, wise one: how is it you bring home so many dames?"

Bucky pushes further back from the table and tips his chair back on two legs. “Like I said. You gotta start subtle. You throw yourself at a sweet little thing and she’s likely to run. You have to, you know, soften her up.”

“And how are you supposed to do that?”

“You, ah, you know. It depends on the situation. You send them a drink, maybe. Or if she’s there with another girl, you go over and make nice with them both. Find out what they do, what kinds of things that they like. We’re not talking genius-level stuff here.”

Steve’s leaning back against the icebox now, his arms crossed, his eyes like high beams. “No wonder you’re good at it, then.”

“You want me to tell you about this or not?”

“Fine,” Steve says with a sigh, like he’s doing Bucky some big fucking favor. “So you chit-chat. What then?”

“Then, it depends. Some girls want to dance. So we dance. Some girls would rather talk. So you talk. The point is, you get to know them a little bit better. Get a sense of what it is they want-- without, you know, coming right out and asking.”

Steve’s whole face is a question. So Bucky keeps talking.

“Ok, it’s like, when you’re dancing, if she gets right up close when the music gets slower, if she flutters her eyes and doesn’t squawk when your hand slips a little around the curve of her hip, that probably means that she’d like a kiss. Or if you’re talking at a table or something and she leans across it and looks right in your eyes and scratches her fingers over the back of your hand--that also says to me  _kiss_.”

“Is that what happened with the one from Saturday? The brunette?”

“More or less.”

“She was pretty. Is pretty, I mean. Where’d you meet her?”

They don’t do this, he and Steve. Never have. In the year that they’ve lived together, they’ve never talked about Bucky’s dates. He’s apologized to Steve for the inconvenience of it, the fitful nature of the zzzs the kid’s able to grab on the couch after Bucky brings a date home unannounced, but lately, Steve’s taken to kipping down out there whenever Bucky goes out for a drink and a flirt, so last Saturday, when he’d pulled Audra and her thick chestnut locks home after 1, they’d been able to tumble right to the sheets--no waiting, no awkward, no mess.

“At Angelo’s.”

“Oh. You buy her a drink?”

“Yeah.”

“You ask her to dance?”

“I think so. She might’ve asked me.”

“And?”

“And,” Bucky says, “it was hot as hell in there. So I took her outside for a smoke and a kiss.”

The kitchen feels like the inside of an oven. The stiff, hot air outside hasn’t softened a lick since the sun started to set; if anything, the whole room feels hotter than it did when they sat down to a cold supper of day-old bread and sliced apples. His undershirt is sticking like a damn second skin.

“I guess she liked that."

“Yeah.” He remembers the feel of her mouth, the way it had shifted when she took his hand and pressed it to her breast. “She did.”

“So what did you say to get her back here?”

The chair creaks beneath him. He feels like a fish on a line. “I mean,” he says, “I didn’t just kiss her once. I kissed her a lot. Until she could feel how much I liked it. And she really liked that.”

“You got hard for her.”

“I just said that.”

“You got hard for her and she liked it. She told you that?”

There’s a weird creeping want in his gut; a echo of the memory, maybe, mixed up. “Yeah. And I told her if she wanted it, she needed to come back here.”

Steve smiles, this slinky, smart-ass looking thing. “That doesn’t sound real subtle to me.”

“No,” Bucky snaps, “but it wasn’t the first thing I said to her, either. We’d worked up to that point.”

“So if I’d worked my way up to what I said before, you might’ve been more amenable?”

“I--In theory, yeah.”

“In theory,” Steve says, the words like broken glass. “Huh.”

Bucky clears his throat, tries to ignore the fact that his dungarees have gone tight. “So that,” he says, bold and brassy, “was me doing you a favor, ok? You’re welcome. Don’t go for broke again the next time you meet somebody who gets you going.”

“You’re the only one who ever has.”

“What?”

“What do you think the whole last year has been about? Jesus, Buck, I’ve tried your subtlety nine ways to Sunday since we moved in together, and where’s that gotten me, huh? Oh, I’ll tell you: the couch.”

“Stevie--”

The kid’s ratcheted right back to furious. “Why the hell do you think I’ve never slept with anybody, you asshole? God, Barnes, you really are a fucking idiot, aren’t you? The only person I want to go to bed with is you.”

Bucky feels like his heart’s on a yoyo, like his brain’s in a shaker. What in the actual fuck? “Since when?”

“Since always!” Steve bellows, his fury flipping out through the open windows. “Since I saw you kissing Carolyn Mathers sophomore year!”

Bucky has a vague memory of blond hair and a sweet mouth; the smell of old books and library paste. “Wait--was this at a dance?”

Steve bobs his head. “It was time to leave--we were gonna miss the last bus--so I went to find you.”

“We were at the end of the hallway, right? By the library?”

“Yeah. You were kissing her and she had her arms around your neck and I felt--fuck, I don’t know how I felt. Confused, I guess, but also hot and good. This feeling in my gut that was like a snake or something, slithery and wet. I’d never felt like that before.”

Bucky frowns. “Didn’t you have a crush on Carolyn, though? You did! You drew her something for Valentine’s, right?"

Steve flushes, a different kind of pink. “I thought so, after that. I thought she’s a girl, I’m a boy, so whatever--God, I don’t know!--whatever’d made me feel so strange was something about her.”

“But it wasn’t.”

The kid’s eyes are wider now. He looks half way to scared. “No. It was you.”

Bucky’s head feels like a domino set rattling around in somebody’s hand; pairs touching, a pattern emerging, the shades of a winning hand. “And all this time,” he says, “all these years, Stevie--you’ve never said a damn thing.”

“Until now!” Steve says, gesturing wild at the table, at the remnants of the past awkward hour. “And look how fucking good that went, huh?”

“I can’t believe it.” It’s been sitting between them for a decade plus, all this. How could he have missed it? Was he that much of a blockhead? How could he have spent most of his waking hours with the kid for so fucking long and not caught a clue, or a hint?

Except maybe he had.

Maybe he’d taken the way Steve treated him for granted.

Oh, the punk doesn't baby him, doesn't pat him or bat his eyelashes or coo. He doesn't lick his lips or laugh too loud at Bucky’s jokes or smile in a way that says  _please_. But there was no question that Steve adores him and that Bucky's known that his whole life. They stuck up for each other and they argued and they took turns making supper, Steve making it look easy and Bucky approaching it like a fight. They shared cigarettes and swapped stories about work and made change out of each other’s pockets for the bus; they always had. Sharing a flop had only formalized it, made their interactions, their daily ribbings, their laughter the skeleton of Bucky’s everyday life.

Sure, it’s not love in a Saturday night sense; love that smelled of Dior, love that was soft and silken and gone in the morning after one last lipstick kiss. But what he and Steve have, what they’d shaped their lives into, Bucky realizes, is love in a different phase, like the moon or something; gibbous instead of a crescent, always waxing, never waning--a light strong enough on a good night to read by.

This, what Steve wants--what maybe, some soft stirring voice says, Bucky wants, too--it’s just the next phase of the game, the next turn of who they are in the same old night sky.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, booting Bucky out his reverie. The kid’s head is hanging now, his whole self in a dead sloop. “Should’ve kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t I?”

Bucky doesn’t say anything. It’s easier to get out of his chair and slide around the table, cup Steve’s chin in his palm. “No,” he says. “You shouldn’t have.”

He kisses Steve gentle, like he would the first time with anybody; not laying on too much pressure but just letting the kid ease into it, one brush of lips at a time. After a minute, Steve’s hands are on his shoulders, kneading at the damp cotton there and making these soft little sounds and it makes Bucky feel bolder, makes him open his mouth up a touch.

There are no curves to hang on to, no plush hips or round ass, but Steve, stick and bones as he is, is like a live wire, squirming and shivering the more Bucky touches him: a stroke over his ribs, an arm slid around Steve’s back, and they’re tucked up together, the icebox at Steve’s back.

It’s different, having his mouth on a man. There’s the scratch of Steve’s peach fuzz for one thing, and he smells hot, like clean sweat and spilled beer left out in the sun. But what matters is how good it feels, how much his blood vibrates as Steve gets bolder: he dips his tongue over Bucky’s lip and digs his nails into Bucky’s back and those little sounds stop being so little at all. He’s hard, too, and when Bucky nudges a knee between his legs the kid’s breath hitches like a hobby horse before he starts rocking against Bucky’s thigh and sighing, sighing, until Bucky’s rutting none to gentle at the kid’s hip.

“Oh,” Steve says, bright and startled. “ _Oh_.”

“Hey,” Bucky says, nipping the word into the kid’s lip. “You like that, huh?”

Steve’s mouth goes slack and he scrabbles at Bucky’s waist, holds on tight. “I--oh, god, Bucky--”

Bucky slams on the brakes, pushes Steve’s hips back until they’re up against the icebox, flat. “I know you’re new at this, Stevie, but I promise you’d like this a whole lot more if you let me take you back to my place.”

“Your place?” Steve claws at Bucky’s ribs. “Is it far?”

He dips his head and licks at Steve’s pulse, angry butterfly. “Not far at all, sweetheart.”

A shudder, a different sort of sigh, Steve’s fingers winding into his hair. “I won’t know what I’m doing, though. Will you show me?”

Bucky laughs and squeezes Steve to him, just this side of too hard. “I have this sneaking suspicion,” he says, “that once I do, you’re gonna do your best to outdo me.”

Steve pulls at his hair and kisses him through the gasp. “Oh, Buck,” he whispers with a grin, that old take no shit Steve slipping in, “you better believe it."


End file.
